‘Of course it does,’ Jordan said. ‘What do you think is going on in there?’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Just a different mutation of the ideas, infecting fresh minds. A selfish meme replicating across time. Your variant of it may be in scores of sects, the Left Alliance and so on, but the most successful species at the moment is in the Black Plan. It’s got its own bloody army.’
‘Now you’re the one talking serdar argic,’ Moh said. He punched Jordan lightly. ‘Come on. You’re talking like it’s some kinda electronic antichrist, taking over the world with—’
‘Barcodes containing 666!’ Jordan laughed. ‘No, it’s just a way of looking at it.’ He made an inverting gesture. ‘Mind you, you’ve just said there’s a connection between the Black Plan and the Fourth International…’
‘Well, maybe in the sense that you mean, that Josh wrote it. Beyond that…I don’t know. Not much sign of Trotskyist ideology in the ANR. Or any other, come to that. They’re pragmatic. Post-futurist.’
‘Exactly,’ Jordan said. ‘The political and military techniques work independently of the ideology.’
‘What would you know about that?’
Jordan shrugged. ‘I read books.’
‘What about the Star Fraction?’ Janis interrupted. ‘Bernstein said he thought that was in the Black Plan.’
‘Not the Fraction itself,’ Moh said, frowning. ‘Just instructions for it, for people like Logan.’
‘“Not the Fraction,”’ Jordan mimicked. ‘“Just instructions for it.” Get a clue, Moh. They’re the same thing.’
‘OK, you can look at it that way if you want.’ He felt stubborn about this, that Jordan and Janis between them were concocting a dubious metaphor for something plainly explicable in political terms. ‘What I think is that the Star Fraction was a real organization that Josh was involved in setting up. It was designed to exploit some kind of capability of the Black Plan but it never got activated.’
‘And what,’ Jordan asked triumphantly, ‘were you so damn’ insistent you’d done yesterday? You activated something!’
Moh stared at him, unable to speak as he experienced the mental flip into seeing things the way Jordan did: ideas as discrete entities – memes – leaping from mind to mind like programs indifferent to the hardware they ran on; language itself as a natural Dissembler, turning words into virtual realities in human brains; ideologies as meme machines, using all the parties and factions, armies and movements, faiths and reasons as their disposable bodies to reproduce another generation of gun-toting or Bible-thumping or programme-quoting or party-building meme-propagators.
He thought of Johnny Smith, the Hizbollah fighter who’d died in his arms (Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!) and whose heroic death had inspired a dozen others, which in their turn…now there was a Johnny Smith Martyr of the Southall Jihad Memorial Children’s Home.
He thought of Guevara, whose words Bernstein had quoted:
Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, reach some receptive ear; that other hands reach out to wield our weapons and other men intone our funeral dirge with the staccato chant of the machine-guns and new battle cries of war and victory.
The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living…as Marx said. Yes, there were generations of the dead and they reproduced themselves…just as there were generations of the living and they reproduced themselves.
He thought of Josh and Marcia, how they had joined the generations of the dead. He looked down at his hands on the warm metal of the assault rifle across his knees. Some part of the weapon Josh had wielded was now buried in this gun, in its cryptic, encrypted memories.
And in his.
‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘I activated something. And I did it with a code I remembered from working with Josh on the Black Plan.’
‘Logan was part of the space fraction,’ Janis pointed out. ‘If this idea about the political programme having been sort of built into the computer program is right—’
‘Then it’s reaching into space,’ Moh said. ‘Oh, yeah, I get the point. It could just go on. Building parties, raising armies, raising hell. Forever.’
‘Centuries, anyway,’ Jordan said. ‘The future is a long time.’
Moh looked at the sky. Glades off, it hurt. Something to do with there not being enough air pollution to keep out the ultraviolet. Or something.
‘Time we called Logan,’ he said.
11
Quantum Localities
Donovan’s mail filter routinely discarded 98.3 per cent of incoming messages: sabotage attempts by enraged systems administrators, enquiries from journalists, advertising shots for everything from nuclear depth-charges to anti-fouling paint. That still left a lot, and it was just lucky that Moh’s message caught his eye. As he read it he laughed at the desperate naivety of the mercenary’s direct approach.
So Catherin had taken his advice and disappeared.
Too soon.
Donovan stood up and tried to massage his stiff shoulders with his aching hands. He’d been up all night, winding down the mechanical ferocity of his virtual hordes. It would probably be another day before the process was complete and they’d have a clear sight of whatever the Watchmaker entity was doing.
A girl in denims and deck-shoes came up from the galley with his breakfast coffee. He nodded to her and motioned her over. She approached with an air-hostess smile that relaxed to gratitude and relief when he asked her to massage his shoulders and neck. The insistent pressure and warmth of her fingers soothed his mind as well as his muscles. He drank the coffee and scanned the news. The increasingly fraught international situation came almost as a relief: it might give the CLA and Stasis time to deal with the Watchmaker entity while Space Defense was busy iraqing the Japanese.
He turned around in his seat. ‘Thank you,’ he told the girl. ‘You can go now.’
‘You’re…welcome, Mr Donovan,’ she said, and walked, very carefully, across the floor and down the ladder. Donovan waited until the sound of her footsteps was lost in the sough of the sea and the sigh of ventilation, and put out a call for Bleibtreu-Fèvre.
Within seconds the Stasis agent’s face appeared on a flat screen. If he had been up all night he certainly didn’t look it. Used to it, perhaps: Donovan had a vague image of him sleeping through the day, hanging upside down by his feet. Bleibtreu-Fèvre apparently mistook Donovan’s momentary amusement for cordiality, and returned him a thin-lipped smile.
‘I’m about halfway there,’ Donovan said. ‘How are your people reacting?’
‘There is no panic,’ replied Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘I have reported my suspicions, but the consensus is still that it was sabotage, if not by your movement then by some freelance hacker. The disruption seems to be over, for the moment. However, Mrs Lawson reports a small but persistent unaccounted increase in net traffic since the…event. Barely detectable, unless one is specifically looking and applying appropriate diagnostics. Like global warming.’ Another thin smile. ‘It is rising – by a very small fraction, but it is rising. It will be obvious to the dimmest sysadmin within about three days, to the rest of my agency some time before that and, no doubt, to Space Defense some indeterminate time after…How banal it will seem,’ he added, ‘if the first tangible evidence of a new intelligence on our planet should be unexpectedly high telephone bills, ha, ha.’